A coupla years ago my suppressed desire to move back to the mountains came back with a vengeance. It had been simmering and bubbling under the surface of my comfortable life in NJ, occasionally fed by random visits to friends in Aspen, Boulder and Castle Rock. The past few years I have been going out there for bike trips. Or any excuse – I was in Denver in March this year for the Month of Photography events. We went out again for a wedding of my best friends’ daughter in October.
At the same time I have been trolling the real estate websites like Zillow, Trulia and Craigslist for places to buy. My buddy in Castle Rock CO is a real estate agent and he hooked me up with three searches on the MLS system – one for homes in the mountains, one for homes in Denver and one for raw land. I wasn’t sure what I wanted but I knew I wanted to get out of NJ.
I was like a guy surfing porn sites on the web, I was obsessed. I looked at houses in Denver, lofts, apartments, raw land in the mountains, remote sites at the end of dirt roads, I checked them out on the real estate sites and if I liked what I saw I checked them out on Google Earth, Bing maps, I did Google searches for the addresses and saw what that brought up. I was like Sherlock Holmes going after clues and trying to detect patterns. On my trips out west I would rent a car and drive around, usually finding that what looks promising on the web can be deceptive, and in the flesh is a muddy expanse at the end of a dirt road next door to someone who lives like Billy-Bob in Appalachia with rusty cars in the yard and an old refrigerator and sofa on the front porch.
But I WAS learning. I figured out I didn’t want to live in Denver when I drove the Jersey Girl around Old Littleton and showed her a nice little ranchette. It was a bit like having a 13-year-old in the passenger seat with her arms crossed, eyes fixed on her phone, pouting and unwilling to even look out the window when I suggested it would be a great next chapter to our lives. But I also learned that I, too, didn’t want to live in Denver right now.
So I narrowed down the search to a few hundred square miles of the eastern slope of the Colorado Rockies. I knew I wanted to be withing a short drive to a major airport. I wanted direct flights to the east and west coasts. I wanted a view, easy access on paved, plowed, and maintained roads, and I wanted some privacy and some peace and quiet. I wanted to be near areas for bicycling – on and off road – cross country skiing, hiking, and fishing. I didn’t care so much about being near a downhill ski area, that chapter of my life was behind me. But I was still looking at both raw land and homes.
The Jersey Girl and my buddy in Castle Rock kept telling me to rent first, to try it out. The devil on my shoulder told me to buy. The Jersey Girl told me she was opposed to building on raw land. The little red guy on my shoulder told me it would be a fun adventure to build, and it is better that I do it responsibly and sustainably than some developer coming in a doing something obscene to a property.
After a lot of research on the web I finally connected with a real estate agent in the area I thought would be good. Her nephew is married to my niece, so we are “shirt-sleeve relatives.” She also runs a horse boarding facility so she bonded with the Jersey Girl. She knows the area well and seemed trustworthy. We seemed to be compatible. The search entered a new phase. We conferred on the phone and by email. I showed her properties I thought were candidates, she showed me others that she thought I/we would like. On our trip to Denver for the October wedding we scheduled a day to meet up with “Agent 007” to tour some likely candidates.